Most people do not know at all how beautiful the world is and how much magnificence is revealed in the tiniest things, in some flower, in a stone, in tree bark, or in a birch leaf. (Letters on Life)

Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.

You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.

It's possible, I'm moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I'm so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone.

What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.

I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything.

The only journey is the journey within.

What batters you becomes your strength.

Our heart always transcends us.

And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.

It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.

It is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

For our part, when we feel, we
evaporate; ah, we breathe
ourselves out and away; with each new
heartfire
we give off a fainter scent. True,
someone may tell us:
you're in my blood, this room, Spring
itself
is filled with you ... To what end?
He can't hold us,
we vanish within him and around him.

Stand up during supper and walk outdoors, and keep on walking.

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.

Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.

Look: the trees exist; the houses
we dwell in stand there stalwartly.
Only we
pass by it all, like a rush of air.
And everything conspires to keep quiet
about us,
half out of shame perhaps, half out of
some secret hope.